#54 - Animation - Debris Objects

To create the oxygen venting effect in the hangar when the shield drops, I firstly created the objects which would be flying out of the hangar. I simply created two cube prefabs and two cylinder prefabs and scaled them into different sizes. The cubes looked like boxes of supplies, and the cylinders looked like the medic droids you get on the CIS ships. I also added a round cap on one of the cylinders and set it to have 9 caps to make it look like an R2-D2 type droid. No detail will really be required on these because I will add a highly reflective blinn so that the glint as they fly past the camera at a high speed.


Once I had positioned the objects inside the hangar, I set out to constrain them so they moved with the Invisible Hand. At first, this worked, however I attempted to make them virtually invisible until frame 480, where I would suddenly scale them up from tiny in frame 479, so they were not visible in the first part of the animation. I then realised that this was totally pointless and I don't know why I decided to do that in the first place, but I moved everything back to frame 0 and tried to constrain them to the ship again using the parent constrain tool. For some reason, they would not follow the ship until frame 420, when they were way outside the hangar already, sort of like an offset except they stay put for the first 420 frames. I tried deleting all constraints from the history, then constrained them again from the new position, but this made no difference. I also deleted all of the key frames the debris objects had, and again, nothing. Finally I tried using the combine tool to attach them as part of the ship, but this deleted all of the Invisible Hand's key frames, so I undid this immediately.

I'm going to come back to this later because it is taking far too long to figure out why the constraint isn't working. I might have to delete all the objects and start again.

Update: I haven't totally fixed this, but I have found a sufficient work around. I constrained the objects from frame 420 on-wards, which is the first time you could see them anyway, and now for the purposes of the camera shot it works, although for the first few frames they are still on a huge offset from the parent object. I have tried adjusting the pivot point but it keeps resetting anyway. For now though, it doesn't matter if the actual scene is strange, as long as the animation itself looks right.

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